Several years ago, my wife and I entered a sweepstakes
sponsored by British Airways. The contest was called “The World’s
Biggest Offer." and the grand prize, limited to a very few, was a trip
for two to any location in the world of the winners' choosing.
Thousands of others would win round trip tickets to London, and still
more who had already bought tickets for flights on a special day in
April, the "Up and Away Day," would fly free. Much to our surprise, we
were among the winners.
What, then, to do with our time in Britain? For my wife, it would
include a visit to a Scotswoman she had befriended while traveling in
Rome during her college semester abroad, now living in the Cotswolds
with her husband. For me, the choice was clear: I would go to
Glastonbury, and find the Lamb.

GLASTONBURY,
ENGLAND

Glastonbury,
England

A PASTEL
RENDERING OF THE TOR
BY MICHAEL McBRIDE

J.
McBrid

The idea of Glastonbury, its image and metaphor,
infused my family’s tradition with the stuff of legend. Hanging above
our mantel, almost as a shrine, was a landscape painted by my father as
a gift to my mother on the occasion of their first wedding anniversary.
Done in pastel, it depicted the Tor, a high hill cluster, somewhat
natural but partly man-made, rising out of what was once pre-historic
marshland in the county of Somerset, just west of the Salisbury Plain
and the monoliths of Stonehenge and Avebury. At the Tor’s summit stood
a stone tower, the remnant of St. Michael’s church, and surrounding it
was the lush landscape of this ancient British town in which they spent
their short honeymoon during the war, in the affectionate care of a
family named Kyne, the owners of the Lamb Hotel.
My mother served as an officer in the Army Nursing Corps in the
European Theater, at the 110th Station Hospital in Netley, Hampshire.
My father was in the Army Air Corps, stationed at Wendling Air Base in
East Anglia as a technical sergeant in an ordnance unit of the 392nd
Bomb Group of Eighth Air Force. My parents had known each other before
the war, and in truth, my father had enlisted with the purpose of
following his love to Europe. She was a captain, he a non-commissioned
officer, so their marriage in 1944 required special permission from
their superiors, and made for an interesting story in the local
newspapers. And to us, throughout our childhood, the fact that she
outranked him was forever a source of gentle teasing.

THE AUTHOR'S PARENTS
AT THEIR WEDDING
T/SGT. MICHAEL J. McBRIDE(MAC) AND CAPTAIN EVELYN L. McBRIDE (NEE LIBBY)
ARE THE COUPLE WITHOUT THEIR CAPS IN THE CENTER OF THE PHOTOGRAPH

My father and my mother both had a good war, if such could
be the case. They had come home uninjured, unscarred by the horrors of
combat, and elevated by memories that sustained their lives, of
camaraderie, the nobility of an honorable fight, and the companionship
of the English, especially the Kyne family, to whose hotel they
returned often as the military obligations permitted, to renew their
courtship and romance. There were nights in my childhood when the
stories of their war came to life, elevated to myth. We would open the
trunk in which they kept their uniforms, and my brother and sister and
I would put them on. We would bring out the photo albums, and look
through pictures of B-24s decorated with images of warriors, three ton
bombs with painted greetings to Hitler. We would examine their insignia
badges, their medals and ribbons, especially the Bronze Star my father
was awarded for devising a wrench that would allow gunners to remove
in-flight the gun barrels disabled by the heat of repetitive firing and
replace them with new ones. And we would hear of the Lamb, this
mystical, magical place and the people who lived there that had so
captured their hearts and formed the enduring context for their union
and the family that was borne of it.

A MESAGE
FOR THE FUHRER

B-24 LIBERATOR

The
392nd Bomb Group
Memorial Association was formed in 1985. The association has more than
700 members who, through their donations and interest, support the
Memorial erected at Wendling Air Base in England. On October 7th, 1989,
it was dedicated in honor of the American men and women who served the
392nd between 1943 and 1945.

Currently the group is seeking financial support in order to maintain
the repair and upkeep of the Memorial and surrounding grounds.
Contributors to the fund are asked to send their donations to the
association's treasurer. His address is:

Mr.
William
McCutcheon
20620 Milton Court
Brookfield, Wisconsin 53045

They
request
that
checks be made
out to "392nd BGMA" and with - (Wendling Memorial) written on the memo
line.

To learn more, or to become a member of the association please visit
them at:

But then a tragedy: one day, moved by an urge to
look again through the symbols of my parents’ heroism, I found the
trunk and the articles within it destroyed by mold. Although a few
things were salvageable and remain intact to this day, most had to be
thrown away: the Eisenhower jacket, my mother’s cape, the dress
uniform, the fatigues. The news hit us like a death, and it was as if a
shroud had been drawn over that phase of our family life, and the tales
of the war were rarely brought to life again, and their dream to return
to that place, if only in the realm of imagination, left unrequited.

Now, with the gift of a trip to England, I had a chance to do what they
could not. It had been many years since the trunk had last been opened,
much more since their wedding, yet there was never a doubt that we
would in our search find the Lamb, and somehow discover that same bliss
that my parents had experienced. Though my father had passed away two
years before our trip, and my mother seventeen years before that, I had
full faith that they would know I had been to Glastonbury.

POPS IN
GLASTONBURY
THE TOR IS IN THE BACKGROUND

THE AUTHOR ON
THE SAME BENCH
THE TOR IS OBSCURED BY THE BUSH

Armed then with a Michelin map of Britain,
some good walking shoes, and a small album of photographs of my parents
at war and in love, we departed for England. The well-wishes of the
British Airways employees and the strains of the bagpipers playing the
“Cock of the North” still rang in our ears when, after a good night’s
sleep, we were off to the land of Somerset and Glastonbury, in search
of the Lamb.

As we approached the town on the
A361, a thick haze brought
a soft focus to the landscape. Out of the misty air, the Tor loomed
like a whale breaching above the ghost of the sea that once had covered
this valley. We drove through the town, finding nothing that bore any
resemblance to the photographs we had brought as reference, nothing
named the Lamb Hotel, so we laid our plight on the mercies of the
elderly gentleman minding the tourist center. He was solicitous, though
puzzled, and unfamiliar with the Lamb Hotel, but would telephone a
friend, the resident Glastonbury expert, whose answer was most
marvelous in its simplicity: what we were seeking was in fact next door
to the center, he said, and was now a pub called the Who'd'A'Thought It?.

After some vigorous knocking on both the pub’s front and
rear doors,
and in mild defiance to the established closing hours, we were let in
by the owners, Bill and Lizzie Knight, who greeted our explanation with
a mild skepticism. Yes, Bill said, he knew the Kyne’s, and he quickly
identified them in our photographs: the Kyne family with my parents, at
the back of the hotel, in front of a now-fallen wall the cobblestones
from which Bill had recently uncovered in his yard; Judith, the Kyne’s
granddaughter, with whom Bill played as a child; Mrs. Kyne, Doris, who
died of lung cancer in 1949, an illness obliquely mentioned in her
letter to my parents the year before, a letter that my mother had kept
safely locked and cherished in a file box since its arrival, a letter
we had also brought with us; and the room where my parents had stayed,
the sign bearing the name of the Lamb Hotel clearly visible through the
window.

Before the war, Bill’s family had
owned the pub, an 18th century inn,
then sold it to the Kyne’s, who ran it for over thirty years. It was
sold again after Doris died, and the hotel declined, getting a bad
though deserved reputation. Bill found that hard to accept, so he
bought it back and began an extensive renovation. The pub interior was
completely re-done, but the upstairs rooms were yet unfinished, with
old sinks, bathtubs, and walls bereft of plaster evidence of the work
in progress. The effort seemed more a labor of love than anything else,
and Bill’s distaste for the memory of its prior character so strong
that he would not speak the name the hotel had before he bought it
back. For him, though, the redemption of its reputation was now so
complete, its remove from what it had once been so surprising, that
there could be no other name for the place:Who’d'A'Thought It?.

THE LAMB'S
CURRENT NAME

BACK TO ITS
FORMER GLORY

A LOVELY
PATIO

We would stay the night, and though the upstairs rooms
themselves were
unsuitable for occupancy, we booked accommodations in a guest house
down the street that Bill and Lizzie owned, and took off to explore the
town.

A small market town that grew from what was long ago an isolated
village in the Somerset marshlands, Glastonbury, through its legends
and landscape, has had a significant role in the spiritual life of
Britain. Its history as a destination for pilgrims can be viewed as the
source of many of its myths, and whether these are considered
traditions, truth, or the mere perpetuation of propaganda that promoted
its place as a center for the commerce generated by these religious
tourists, is a matter of continued debate. In truth these legends so
resonate with its unique ability to attract and sustain the sacred,
that they still thrive today. Joseph of Arimathea, in whose tomb the
fallen Jesus was buried, is said to have traveled here with the young
Christ, returning after the Crucifixion to make his home among a
community of hermits and bringing with him the Holy Grail, which he
buried in the Chalice Well at the base of the Tor, whose water flows
red. At the spot where he landed, Wearyall Hill, one of the seven hills
which at the time of his arrival by boat would still have been islands,
he planted his staff, and from it grew the Glastonbury Thorn, a
descendant of which still blooms today at Christmas. It was here that
the first Christian church in England was founded by Joseph, built of
wattle and daub, and where he, the great-uncle of the messiah, died.
It was shortly after the destruction of this church by fire in the 12th
century that the monks had new cause to celebrate their destination and
give those on pilgrimage new reason to journey to the Abbey: the
discovery of the graves of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere in the
cemetery. An amalgamation, perhaps, of stories about the kings and
soldiers who defended this Celtic Christian country against the
invading Angles and Saxons after the Romans had left in the 6th
century, the Arthurian legends are well grounded in Glastonbury
and its Tor. It was here that Arthur came to rescue his kidnapped
queen. It was here, in the Celtic Underworld, the Isle of Avalon
entered through the summit of the Tor, that his famous Excalibur was
forged. And it was here he came in a futile attempt o heal the mortal
wounds he received in his final battle with Mordred at the Slaughter
Bridge in Cornwall.

With this “discovery” renewing its notoriety, the Abbey once
again
prospered as a tourist site, acquiring riches that at one time rivaled
the great centers of Canterbury and Westminster. But under the reign of
Henry VIII, it was seized by the Crown and stripped of its riches. The
Abbot was drawn and quartered. The stones of the Abbey, moved from the
remains of the first St. Michael’s Church on the Tor, themselves
remnants of a Neolithic fort which in legend belonged to Arthur
himself, were sold as quarry to form the homes, churches, and pubs that
now fill the town. The pilgrims still come to the Glastonbury Abbey,
but it is now a wounded place, its ruined arch rising to the heavens in
supplication to a deity whose mindfulness has been cast elsewhere, with
a notable indifference to the persecution and cruelty that befell its
inhabitants and its structures. Yet majestic as such, nobler – though
battered, it is not yet defeated; open to the sky, it is now a part of
the landscape, a companion to the mysterious and far-older Tor, which
is also a work of man now absorbed by nature, possessed of an
underworld of buried relic and the bones of temples.

As we climbed the Tor, an old West
Country word for hill, we
followed the pathway that rings its slope and forms a spiral to the
top. A sacred, Neolithic labyrinth, built at the time of Stonehenge, or
simply the natural ruts formed on the grass by generations of grazing
animals, or terraces used by the monks for farming on the hillside when
this area was marshland, it presents a tantalizing puzzle to those who
walk it. The mysticism of Glastonbury lies not just in the realm of
Christianity, but was firmly established long before the arrival of
that new religion. The Celts, who founded this village in the third
century BC when the sea came fully to the base of the Tor, speak in
their legends of this place, this Island of Glass, as a Druidic
sanctuary and a gateway to the Underworld; and this path echoes similar
patterns as those found in Crete, Italy, Ireland, and ironically, since
Glastonbury is the legendary burial ground of Arthur, also at the
hero’s birthplace in Tintagel, Wales. Created when the Tor itself was
reshaped by these ancients to bring believers to the King of the
Underworld and his spiral castle, the path circles the Tor seven times
and ends at the top of the hill, the place that in Celtic faith was the
bridge between earth and sky.

The wind was strong at the top, the
clouds
grey under the sun, which tried hard to breakthrough the overcast but
managed only to cast a faint orange tinge to the haze, lending a
mystical quality to the light. Sheep munched on the grass, noisily
conversing as they chewed their endless meal. We sat for awhile, in the
shadow of St. Michael’s tower, a tribute to the warrior Archangel who
defeated the powers of darkness and in fact a replacement of the
original church, which collapsed in an earthquake in the 13th century
and whose stones, from Arthur’s hilltop fort, were later used to build
the Abbey. When that structure was destroyed, the villagers took the
stones to build their homes, shops, and pubs, thus imbuing the ordinary
with magic.

GLASTONBURY
ABBEY

SAINT MICHAEL'S TOWER

When we could take the cold no longer, we descended back to
the hotel,
the Who’d'A'Thought It?now but always the Lamb, and
had a pint. Dinner was traditional English pub fare: peas and ham in a
cream sauce, broiled lamb chops in mint, country sausage with hot
mustard. We sat toward the front, gazing at the interior, all renovated
since my parents had stayed there, and tried to resurrect their
presence from the few things that may have witnessed their stay: the
mantel and fireplace, a mirror that looked much like the one on the
photograph, a rack of pipes, the blue plates, so much like the ones our
family used.

DISTINCTIVE
MIRROR

A FIREPLACE ADDS
WARMTH

Afterwards,
we
moved
into another room, where the Roger Bond Group,
local amateur jazz band, was playing. A gentleman of about seventy
noted that with us, the audience had just tripled. He had asked for
“Rosetta,” he said, and as the band took up the notes of that standard
and filled the room with a poignant hint of love gained and now
departed, we had our tea and pudding. The crowd grew, as did the
appreciation of the band’s music, both of which enlarged the
capabilities of the musicians. Roger played saxophone and clarinet, and
was joined by a cornet player, a rhythm guitarist, a bass player, and a
drummer. The guitar player sometimes lagged a little, but no one
minded; he was certainly intent, almost biting off the tongue that
poked through his lips every now and then and seemed essential to his
style. None of them looked the jazz musician part; there was no
attitude, no attempt at coolness. Those who wore bifocals let them slip
conveniently down their nose; their attire ranged from sweaters and
jeans to buttoned-down shirts. Roger himself was the most fashionable,
but he had been to New Orleans, as his band mates kept reminding the
audience, and was therefore entitled. No one took offense at the
good-natured heckling and the atmosphere was casual and friendly,
imbuing in us and the others in the pub an air of pleasant memories, of
lives fully–lived, of wonder at the magic of places such as Glastonbury
and their power to aggregate the happiness of its inhabitants and
convey it to the newcomers.

THE ROGER BOND BAND

The band broke into “When the Saints Go Marching
In,” and last call was announced. We were bid farewell by Bill Knight,
by Roger Bond, by the few people who had shared in the music with us.
We left the next day, though we did not want to, and in a way never
have, nor did my parents. There was something about this hotel, in this
small town on the Salisbury plain of Somerset, whether it was called
the Lamb or the Who’d ‘A Thought It, that my parents felt, that we felt
now, some wellspring of warmth and companionship that transcended
whatever adversity, war, grief, or regret, that was in the present. It
was as if all of us in that pub shared a past, that we were all the
same people meeting over and over again, though in different
incarnations, different lives, yet still overjoyed at the reunion.
Almost as if, long ago, we had met as pilgrims to the Abbey, or in
Arthur’s court, and had vowed always to return here, and meet again and
again through out the centuries. The British travel writer, H. V.
Morton, wrote in 1927 that “it is, perhaps, not strange that all
places, which have meant much to man, are filled with an uncanny
atmosphere, as if something were still happening there secretly; as if
filled with a hidden life.”

WELCOMING
BAR

CHARMING DINING
ROOM

In this ancient ground, then, where once the sea met the
land, and the
living met the dead, we had found the Lamb.